Actor to Watch

Koji Yakusho

Koji Yakusho was born in Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan, in 1956, as the youngest of five brothers. Impressed by a stage play "The Lower Depths" by Maxim Gorky in the summer of 1976, Yakusho started seeing many plays and decided to be an actor. In the spring of 1978, he joined Mumei-juku, an acclaimed actor training studio in Japan led by a well-known actor, Tatsuya Nakadai.

In 1983 and 1984, he played the major role of Oda Nobunaga in the yearlong TV drama "Tokunaga Ieyasu" (a famous Japanese Shogun in the early 17th century), and also performed the title role in the yearlong samurai drama "Miyamoto Musashi". Since then he has appeared in various stage plays and movies, as well as TV dramas and commercials.

For stage plays, he has performed major roles in productions of Machiavelli's "Mandragola" (as Callimaco), Shakespeare's "Hamlet" (as Laertes), Lanford Wilson's "Burn This" (as Pale), and Martin Sherman's "Bent"(as Max). For movies, he won 14 awards as best actor for his performance in "Shall we Dance?", "Sleeping man", and "Shabu Gokudo" in 1996. He played the lead role in Shohei Imamura's "The Eel", which won the Golden Palm at the 50th Cannes Film Festival in 1997. Koji received a special award from the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture of Japan in the category of Cinema in 1998.

He made his Hollywood success in the movie adaptation of the bestselling novel "Memoirs of Geisha" in 2005. Following this title, he stayed strong in Hollywood as he appeared in "Babel" as Yasujiro, alongside popular stars such as Brad Pitt. Keep a look-out for his next movie, which is also starring Keira Knightly, called "Silk". It will be in theatres sometime next year.

**Reference: Internet Movie Database